Just like all my other site seeing posts, here is what I could find on the Internet to explain Tiananmen Square! Other people can say things so much better than me. We started our day tour at the square around 8:30. It is way larger than you could even imagine! I had seen pictures of it before and heard about it but you don’t realize what it is like until you step foot onto the pavement. It was simply incredible. We walked around for quite awhile and looked at everything. The one thing we found out is that the Chinese do not talk about what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989. They resurfaced the square to get rid of any stains left over from the riots and haven’t spoken about it since. It is actually forbidden talk about and when you try and search it here nothing comes up. While we were there and taking pictures, we had a few people come up to us and ask to take our picture! This happened a couple of times. If I am every famous one day, I hope all these people can sell my picture for a lot of money.
Just a little bit of facts and history about the square for you!
Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the center of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen (“Gate of Heavenly Peace”) located to its north, separating it from the Forbidden City. The square contains the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the Great Hall of the People, the National Museum of China, and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in the square on October 1, 1949. Tiananmen Square is within the top ten largest city squares in the world and it has great cultural significance, as it was the site of several important events in Chinese history.
Outside China, the square is best known in recent memory as the focal point of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, a pro-democracy movement which ended on 4 June 1989 with the declaration of martial law in Beijing by the government and the shooting of several hundred, or possibly thousands, of civilians by soldiers.
The Tiananmen (“Gate of Heavenly Peace”), a gate in the wall of the Imperial City, was built in 1415 during the Ming dynasty. In the 17th century, fighting between Li Zicheng’s rebel forces and the forces of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty caused heavy damage to, or even destroyed, the gate. Tiananmen Square was designed and built in 1651, and has since been enlarged by four times its original size in the 1950s.
Near the center of the square stood the “Great Ming Gate”, the southern gate to the Imperial City, renamed “Great Qing Gate” during the Qing dynasty, and “Gate of China” during the Republican era. Unlike the other gates in Beijing, such as the Tiananmen and the Zhengyangmen, this was a purely ceremonial gateway, with three arches but no ramparts, similar in style to the ceremonial gateways found in the Ming tombs. This gate had a special status as the “Gate of the Nation”, as can be seen from its successive names. It normally remained closed, except when the Emperor passed through. Commoner traffic was diverted to side gates at the western and eastern ends of the square, respectively. Because of this diversion in traffic, a busy marketplace, called “Chess Grid Streets”, was developed in the big, fenced square to the south of this gate.
In 1860, during the Second Opium War, when British and French troops invaded Beijing, they pitched camp near the gate and briefly considered burning down the gate and the entire Forbidden City. They decided ultimately to spare the Forbidden City and instead burn down the Old Summer Palace. The Xianfeng Emperor eventually agreed to let the foreign powers barrack troops – and later establish diplomatic missions – in the area, hence there was the Legation Quarter immediately to the east of the square. When the forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance besieged Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, they badly damaged the office complexes and burnt down several ministries. After the Boxer Rebellion ended, the area became a space for the foreign powers to assemble their military forces.
In 1954, the Gate of China was demolished, allowing for the enlargement of the square. In November 1958, a major expansion of Tiananmen Square started, which was completed after only 11 months, in August 1959. This followed the vision of Mao Zedong to make the square the largest and most spectacular in the world, and intended to hold over 500,000 people. In that process, a large number of residential buildings and other structures have been demolished. On its southern edge, the Monument to the People’s Heroes has been erected. Concomitantly, as part of the Ten Great Buildings constructed between 1958–59 to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Hall of the People and the Revolutionary History Museum (now the National Museum of China) were erected on the western and eastern sides of the square.
The year after Mao’s death in 1976, a mausoleum was built near the site of the former Gate of China, on the main north-south axis of the square. In connection with this project, the square was further increased in size to become fully rectangular and being able to accommodate 600,000 persons.
The urban context of the square was altered in the 1990s with the construction of National Grand Theatre in its vicinity and the expansion of the National Museum.
-Jami-
Jami and Taylor 